The latest edition of Global Histories: A Student Journal is now available, featuring articles and reviews on current work, emerging sub-fields and debates within the frame of Global History. To find out more and either read the latest addition online, or download it, follow the link bellow.

This workshop has two aims: first, to bring considerations of gender into international history; second, to reconceptualise international Jewish history as having a gendered dimension. This focus on the experience of a particular group of actors will allow for a more systematic engagement with the conceptual issues involved in gendering internationalism. While many of the papers will engage specifically in gendering Jewish internationalism, we also welcome papers which compare and contrast Jewish and non-Jewish experiences, and which use Jews to think about gendering international history more generally. We would furthermore encourage contributions from those whose work features Jewish actors – both women and men – but who do not necessarily situate them within the framework of Jewish history; as well as from those who work on gendering internationalism from a variety of comparable perspectives, such as diaspora, religion, nation, and ethnicity.

The workshop will explore how hierarchical relations between men and women, social and cultural constructions of masculinity/femininity, organizational structures and asymmetries, division of labor along gender lines, and relationships among activists vary according to certain gender dynamics, and how they interacted with a variety of internationalist commitments, ideologies, and causes. This could include secularism, spirituality, and religious commitments; liberalism and the habits of diasporic belonging; or socialism/Bundism, pacifism, nationalism/Zionism, trafficking, migration/refugees, and communism.

Questions we seek to address:
• How did gender shape the politics and culture of internationalism? What happens when gender is added as a category of analysis for Jewish internationalism?
• How effectively was women’s internationalism integrated into the broader sphere of international organisations and institutions like the League, the UN, the ILO, or the Third International? How does gender play into the different scales or levels of internationalist activity? Does the history of Jewish women’s activism look different when the international level is scrutinized in addition to the home front?
How far did the gendered nature of Jewish internationalism reflect the gender roles attached to/ assumed by Jewish men and women in local and national contexts?
• How did gender identity intersect with other kinds of identity (class, nation, religion, etc.) in the international arena? What are the similarities and differences between the gendering of Jewish internationalism and the internationalism of other religious, national, and diasporic groups?
• How did gender politics and different conceptions of masculinity and femininity and the gendered nature of intellectual/political discourse shape international activism? When and why do Jewish men and women go international?
• How might historians effectively integrate the history of women’s internationalism with the history of other internationalist currents and international bodies? What happens, for example, when we broaden the definition of modern Jewish politics or international history to take account of subtler political acts that were open to a broader range of people and organizations, such as philanthropy, commerce, social reform, or religious reform? Or if we agree to see Jews in non-Jewish roles as Jewish actors?
• What was distinctive about internationalist action undertaken by women? How far did the international activism of Jewish women replicate broader patterns? What was the relationship between Jewish internationalism and causes embraced bythe international women’s movement like feminism, trafficking, disarmament, pacifism, and the status of women and children?
• Did the gendered nature of internationalist activity create or rely upon homosocial worlds and networks? Did the sociability and gendered patterns within organizations like the World Jewish Congress or the Alliance Israelite Universelle mean something for the kind of internationalist activity they undertook?
• What was the relationship of the family and kinship to international activism? Did certain Jewish families become conduits for internationalist activities?
• What, if anything, was different about the gendering of Jewish internationalism?

Confirmed speakers include Anne Summers, Rebecca Kobrin, Glenda Sluga, and Deborah Hertz. We are now inviting abstracts for 15-minute individual papers to be presented within panels. Reasonable travel and accommodation will be covered. Besides Western European and North American, we are interested in contributions that consider these issues from the perspective of actors and organizations based in Asia, Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, and that engage Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrachi Jewish experiences. The workshop is expected to result in a peer-reviewed publication.

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung invite submissions for a three-day conference in Berlin on concepts of historical periodization in transregional perspective. The conference is convened by Thomas Maissen (Deutsches Historisches Institut Paris, DHIP), Barbara Mittler (Heidelberger Centrum für Transkulturelle Studien, HCTS), and Pierre Monnet (Institut franco-allemand de sciences historiques et sociales, Frankfurt am Main). The conference will feature a keynote lecture on December 7th and several topical panel sessions on December 8th and 9th. It is arranged in cooperation with the Einstein Center Chronoi and the Graduate School Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Concept

Epochal divisions and terminologies such as “antiquity”, “baroque,” the “classical age,” the “renaissance,” or “postmodernity,” the “long 19th!” or “short 20th” centuries are more than mere tools used pragmatically to arrange school curricula or museum collections. In most disciplines based on historical methods the use of these terminologies carries particular imaginations and meanings for the discursive construction of nations and communities. Many contemporary categories and periodisations have their roots in European teleologies, religious or historical traditions and thus are closely linked to particular power relations. As part of the colonial encounter they have been translated into new “temporal authenticities” in Africa, Asia and the Americas, as well as in Europe. German historians in particular, in C.H. Williams’ ironic description, “have an industry they call ‘Periodisierung’ and they take it very seriously. (…) Periodisation, this splitting up of time into neatly balanced divisions is, after all, a very arbitrary proceeding and should not be looked upon as permanent.” In producing and reproducing periodisations, historians structure possible narratives of temporality, they somehow “take up ownership of the past,” (Janet L. Nelson) imposing particular “regimes of historicity” (François Hartog). Accordingly, periodisations are never inert or innocent, indeed, they have been interpreted as a “theft of History” (Jack Goody).

The aim of this conference is to uncover some of the dynamics behind particular cultural and historical uses of periodisation schemes, as concepts for ordering the past, and thus to reconsider these terminologies “devised to think the world” (Sebastian Conrad). Periodisations are culturally determined. They beg for systematic comparison in order to identify the contextual specificity and contingency of particular understandings of particular historical epochs. An interdisciplinary and transregional perspective allows for a reconsideration of the (non-)transferability of historical periodisations and the possibility to work out categories of historical analysis that go beyond nation-bound interpretative patterns. The conference aims to show where and how periodisation reveals clear cultural, social, and national leanings and predispositions. We will discuss the making of these chronologics, the variable systems and morphologies it takes, e.g. religious, spatial and other models (e.g. linear, spiral, circular). We will focus on different agents and modes involved in the making of periodisation schemes (institutions ranging from the university to the school or the museum but also genres such as the documentary, the historical novel or local communities). We will discuss how European attempts at structuring the History, and along with them, particular chronotypes have been translated worldwide into universal and/or national, and communitarian models. At the same time, we will also focus on alternative, complementary and or silenced models of periodisation and epoch-making. By bringing together scholars with an expertise in different regions of the world, we hope to better understand the importance of temporality in the making of global history.

Application Procedure

This call is open to emerging as well as established scholars on all levels. Abstracts should address themselves to some of the following issues and questions:

1. The Making of Periodisation Schemes

2. Morphologies and Models of Periodisation

3. Axial Times and Epochal Breaks

4. Time and Power: Periodisation in a Global Context

5. Popular and Pedagogical Dimensions of Periodisation

As the institutions involved have French, German and English as working languages, papers can be held in all of these three languages while the working language at the conference will be English. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words for paper presentations of 20-25 minutes. Please submit, along with a brief biographical statement, to initiatives@trafo-berlin.de by April 30, 2017. Selection of papers will take place in May, applicants will be informed by the end of May. The Forum Transregionale Studien will cover participants’ travel and accommodation expenses. Participants invited for presentation will have a version of their paper published online at “Trafo – Blog for Transregional Research” and may have the option to publish their papers in an edited print/open access format as well.

The New York University Department of History and the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School are inviting abstracts for a one-day workshop Global Histories of Capital: New Perspectives on the Global South. We are seeking paper proposals from advanced graduate students working broadly on themes related to the history of capitalism, historical political economy, the history of economic life and new materialism. The workshop aims to connect scholars working on topics or countries considered part of the global south, international history and those engaged in comparative historical research.

Workshop Objectives

The aim is to bring together graduate students working on areas of the non-west, broadly conceived, whose work approaches questions of the economic from political, environmental, intellectual and cultural perspectives. In light of growing interest in the status of the economic to social scientific inquiry — spurred by research programs from the history of capitalism to new materialism — the objective is to foster a critical conversation about how we write such histories from world-regions outside Western Europe and North America. By bringing together scholars of varied regional expertise, we hope we might more precisely reframe the relevance of categories such as the ‘global south’ and ‘non-west’ within their specific relationship to historical processes of globalization and imperialism.

The emphasis on the ‘global’ nature of this history is not simply to fill-in a preexisting cartography that has been relatively neglected by new histories of capitalism. Rather, we intend to explore how the global emerged as a category under modern capitalism and the different moments in which it has been imagined and redefined, and perhaps misrecognized. Understanding the global spaces of capitalism requires close attention to methodological questions of comparability, scale, historical structure and unevenness. Therefore this workshop intends to group scholars thematically, rather than by region or periodization, in order to develop comparative vocabularies for doing this type of historical work.

For a long time the decline of kinship in the course of Western history seemed so certain that there was little interest in research on this topic outside the study of so-called ‘traditional’ societies. Linked to the notion of the decline of kinship is the separation of kinship and politics. Both have long genealogies and enormous consequences for research and policy-making. Particularly in the domain of politics the presence of kinship was (and is) seen as something to be exorcised in order to establish ‘rational’ administrative systems and mobilise colonial and postcolonial populations and has even found its way into current military strategizing on how to fight insurgencies. The presence of ‘kinship’ as opposed to ‘family’ is behind such distinctions as modern and traditional, “Western” and “Other” societies.

The summer school’s goal is to re-examine the relationship between politics and kinship. Organised by the ZiF 2016/17 research group on Kinship and Politics, the summer school intends to intervene in these debates by getting doctoral students and early career scholars to focus on this major conceptual problem. The summer school will revolve aroundtwo core theoretical perspectives: (a) “kinship” and “family” as analytical categories and (b) uses of kinship in political practice. The panels aim at bridging critical historical epistemology and empirical case studies. They are organised around four problem areas that should be examined from perspectives beyond a single discipline, region, or historical period:

Property and kin relations

Conceptualising, implementing and negotiating the nuclear family

Boundary work: kinning the state – state kinning

The (re)making of political order, in particular through children

These problem areas aim at challenging the long-held assumption that kinship has played an ever-declining role in “modernizing” societies and at interrogating the co-production of kinship and politics as well as the negotiation of their boundaries. Questions might deal with the conceptual divide between kinship and family worked out in Western social sciences during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How was the nuclear family understood in contrast with other kinship structures both within the West and in the non-Western world? How and why did states, non-governmental organisations and social movements take up normative constructions and apply them in the definition of estates and races, in welfare, warfare and international development? Research might also focus on how the boundaries between ‘family’ and ‘kinship’ have been mobilised and negotiated in political practices. Contributions could focus on the link between kinship, heritage, succession and loyalty to institutions raised in such topics as social parenting, compulsory pre-school education, home schooling and the forced removal of indigenous children. The issue of the use of children in the reproduction of the political order is not limited to political agencies: debates might include surrogate motherhood, fostering, international adoption practices and birth tourism for purposes of acquiring citizenship or social security benefits.

The summer school offers up to 16 postgraduates and advanced doctoral students the opportunity to discuss their work with peers, senior guest scholars and distinguished fellows of the ZiF Kinship and Politics research group. Participants will discuss pre-circulated papers (up to 8000 words excluding the bibliography).

Accommodation and Travel

Accommodation and travel costs (basic economy flights and second-class train tickets) of the participants will be covered. There are no fees for the summer school.

Application

We invite postgraduates and advanced doctoral students from Anthropology, History, Sociology, Political Sciences and neighbouring disciplines to send us their applications by 1st April 2017. Applications should include a letter stating the reasons for applying, a short CV, an abstract (250 words maximum) and an outline of research results (up to 5 pages) to be presented at the summer school.

The KCL World History Student Conference has extended their application deadline to the 1st of March, 2017. Applicants wishing to apply for this call for papers should remember that this call for papers is open to students of all academic disciplines and university levels (undergraduate to doctoral) interested in World History. Depending on the topics of their submissions, authors of selected papers will be one of three panelists leading a debate on a particular field of World History. Suggested topics for proposals are listed below, but these are not exclusive.
Theory and Methodologies of World/Global History

History of Right-Wing Politics

Transnational Social Movements

International Governing Institutions

Pan-Identities

History of Science and Medicine

Transnational Religion

Commodity History

History of Emotions

Gender Studies

Economic History

Proposals should include a 500 word abstract of the author’s research and a short CV. In the abstract, you should summarise: 1) the topic; 2) arguments and/or a thesis; 3) the relevance to World History (i.e. its transnational value). Please note that we welcome papers from all historical periods. It is not necessary for the paper to be completed for a proposal to be accepted. Accepted proposals will be notified via e-mail by mid-March. The submitted abstracts will then be published on the conference website. After the conference, authors of accepted proposals will have the opportunity to have their final papers published.

The proposal can also be written in Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish to facilitate non-fluent English students and should be submitted as a PDF attachment to kclworldhistoryconf@gmail.com. However, at the conference, papers must be presented in English.

In celebrating the drive towards decolonisation at SOAS and the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain, ‘Queer’ Asia is interested in diverse and new ways of representing, negotiating and mediating queer desires. With a focus on desire and its intersections with decolonisation and decriminalisation in postcolonial global societies the conference aims to examine what desire implies for queer Asians.

What do queers want? How do queers mediate their desires in the face of social opposition, legal persecution, colonial and neo-colonial impositions as well as accelerating globalisation? How is queer desire negotiated and represented both within Asia and in Asian diasporas? Does decriminalisation necessarily emancipate desire? Under what conditions can decolonisation imagine desire?

We would like to invite all those working on facets of queerness in/on Asia to submit an abstract on any of these or related areas. Papers could address, but are not limited to, the following sub-themes:

Erasure of marginalised gender expressions and some sexualities within notions of desire.

Inter-ethnic relations/intercultural/cross-cultural practices.

HIV/AIDS awareness – the globalisation of these movements in Asian contexts.